The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. This programme of targeted mass murder was a central part of the Nazis’ broader plans to create a new world order based on their ideology.

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

The Holocaust was a horrific event driven by a combination of factors, including deep-rooted antisemitism, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and their ideology of racial superiority. The Nazis propagated the belief that Jewish people, along with other minority groups, were to blame for Germany's economic and social problems.

“In the preceding months, the Allies had liberated hundreds of Nazi camps, revealing their full horror. Further east, the Soviet Army uncovered mass graves – a result of the murders carried out at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen.” (Moore)

“In total, six million Jews, around three million Soviet prisoners of war, up to 500,000 Roma, and approximately 70,000 disabled people were killed. Many others, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners, homosexuals and lesbians were also persecuted.”(Moore)

“Although reports of the Nazis’ atrocities against Jews reached Allied countries shortly after they began in 1942, the realities of the Holocaust came as a profound shock to the Western public as they received the media reports of the liberation of camps such as Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. Indeed, the very fact that genocide had taken place in Europe, an area thought of by the West to be the height of educated human civilisation, deepened this shock.”(Moore)

“The ordeal people had been through brought an extraordinary dedication to helping those in need. Yogi Mayer, a teacher and sports instructor who had escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, was a leading light in the Primrose Club, giving a lifeline to hundreds of young camp survivors who arrived in the UK in 1945. Those young survivors went on to form the ’45 Aid Society, raising funds to support Holocaust education and other survivors.”(Rebuilt Lives)

“Special reception centres offered help with resettlement, but the scale of refugees on the move in the late 1940s was colossal and the obstacles were huge. For many there were false starts and disappointments, and much could turn on the luck of finding a caring spouse, a teacher prepared to give extra encouragement or a supportive workplace.”(Rebuilt Lives)

“To help care for these Jewish survivors and those displaced by war, humanitarian organisations descended on Europe to offer immediate relief and, for the million or so people who remained at the end of 1945, longer-term rehabilitation. This relief and rehabilitation included an extensive range of activities such as medical, educational, religious, and cultural services, family tracing, legal advice and emigration.”(Moore)

“After the war, hundreds of thousands of Jews who somehow managed to survive, either in the camps, in hiding, or in the Soviet Union, returned to their homes, only to be met with anger and animosity by their neighbors. Antisemitic gangs murdered approximately 1,500 Jewish survivors in Poland alone, in the first months after the liberation. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled westwards and gathered in camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.”(Vashem)

“For those arriving in the UK those early years here were far from easy. The facts of the Holocaust had not been properly pieced together, society was less multi-cultural than it is today and there was suspicion and disbelief of survivors’ stories.” (Rebuilt Lives)

“Questions emerged: How did this happen? How did this happen here? Could we have done more to prevent it? How much did we know about this?”(Moore)